Book Review: The Sari Shop Widow: A Spicy Pick With Many Twists

This interesting book titled The Sari Shop Widow has been written by Shobhan Bantwal. 

Anjali Kapadia is a 37 years old widow and is not too sexy but still is substantially attractive to grab attention of any man around her age. Anjali lost her husband 10 years back due to brain aneurysm, only two years after their marriage. That was the biggest shock for Anjali and her parents. They had a love marriage as Vikram, Anjali's husband was an electronics engineer, and very handsome. He helped Anjali to fulfil her dreams after they both fell in love with each other.  She is talented enough to accept any kind of challenges while running her boutique named as "Silk and Sapphires". But this title did not suit her as the word in her boutique title "sapphire" brought bad luck of Saturn in her life. She stays with her parents and they jointly run this store. One fine day all hell broke loose when she is told by her father that the boutique is not doing good for last so many months and they are going to be bankrupt. 

Anjali and her mother did not accept the proposal of Anjali's father that her father's elder brother Jeevan Bhai has been invited to help the family to take them out of this crisis. Jeevan lives in India and is a very successful businessman there. He is more than a dictator and has been very tough to all in his life. He keeps dictating about eating habits, living style and so on to anyone in the family. Anjali's parent had a late child, her younger brother, almost 18 years younger to her. Nilesh, Anjali's younger brother, had no interest in his family's business.

The boutique that Anjali started, was earlier her father's shop that was not very flourished neither was doing too good. Anjali, after doing her degree in Apparel Design and Merchandising decided to  convert her father's orthodox shop into this boutique. She never accepted her parent's idea of going for remarriage as most of the candidates were either widowers or divorced. Anjali could never accept to take care of kids of any other man. Also she could not find any other man matching her husband's vigor and sense of humor. 

Though she was psychologically connected deeply with her husband's memories but being young and to fulfill her desires she gets attracted to a bar owner who too had a good sense of humor and was very sexy. Anjali got physically attracted to this man Kiprowling. Anjali thus developed sexual relationship with Kiprowling but  she was always afraid to think about the disaster that will come in her life if her parents come to know about her sexual relationship. Anjali was never in love with Kip and could never think of marrying the new man in her life who was having a very carefree lifestyle whereas she belonged to an orthodox family.

And then her uncle from India arrived to help Anjali's family to get them out of their financial crisis. Her uncle Jeevan came along with a man named Rishi Shah, who was his business partner, and was a few years older than Anjali. This man sprouted a new kind of feeling in Anjali gradually and for the second time in her life she started falling in love with this man. He was already having live-in relationship with a beautiful girl. He was handsome but never showed any indications towards Anjali and stayed aloof and cool all the time. But a moment came in their life when they found that a different kind of bonding had developed in between the two. Rishi was quite brilliant and intelligent to understand the problem behind the failure of Anjali's boutique and started helping them to revive back to get them out of this crisis.

The book is bound to give lot of twists and turns and thus keep reader hooked to the story of Anjali, Kip and Rishi in this book The Sari Shop Widow written by Shobhan Bantwal. At times it would appear as a typical Bollywood drama script suited well for Indian cine-viewers.